In the Middle of the Space A Sibling Should Be

Ten months ago, if you had asked me whether I could ever imagine being pregnant again, my answer would have been immediate. No.

After Haven died in October, I couldn't separate pregnancy from loss anymore. I couldn't imagine carrying another baby without waiting for the other shoe to drop. I couldn't picture letting myself hope, actually hope, that we'd get to bring a baby home this time. Pregnancy had become synonymous with heartbreak, and it wasn't a decision so much as a wall that went up on its own.

I still think about that hospital room. The quiet of it. The way the nurses lowered their voices, the way time stopped meaning anything. I remember holding her and knowing, in the same breath, both how much I loved her and how impossible it felt to ever want to walk back into a room like that again. That room is still in me. It probably always will be.

Nearly ten months later, the wall is still there. But something else has grown up alongside it, and I wasn't expecting that.

Nothing will ever take Haven's place. I want to say that plainly, because it matters. This isn't a post about "moving on" or replacing her, as if a sibling could fill the shape she left. That shape is hers alone. But I keep finding myself standing in a different kind of grief now, one I didn't see coming: grieving a world where Sully grows up without a brother or sister.

I watch him with his cousins, chasing them around, completely undone with joy. I watch him with our best friend's little girl, the way his whole face changes. And I watch the quieter moments too, the way he talks about his baby sister, the way he still looks for her sometimes. He longs for her. And I can't shake the picture of him growing up as an only child, because it's a picture that never existed in my mind before. Marco and I both grew up with siblings. It was never something we questioned or planned around. It was just always going to be there, the same way we assumed Haven would be here.

So now I'm standing in this strange middle place, knowing I want Sully to have a sibling, and knowing exactly what it might cost to try.

Two miscarriages before Haven. Then Haven, born still. So when people say things like "at least you know you can get pregnant," I understand what they mean, but they've got the wrong fear. Getting pregnant was never the hard part for us. It's everything that comes after: the waiting, the scans, the silence in a room where you're praying for a sound. It's every milestone that used to feel exciting now just marking how much further there is to fall. It's knowing, not fearing in the abstract but actually knowing, that something bad can happen, because it already has, three times, in three different ways.

Before Haven, I knew losing a baby would be devastating. Now I know exactly how devastating. I know what it does to a marriage, a body, a mind. I know what it feels like to walk through a grocery store with arms that ache for a baby who should be there. And I know that if it happened again, I don't know if we'd recover, not really. That's the fear. I'm not going to dress it up as something smaller than it is.

People sometimes assume that because we have faith, the fear disappears. I wish that were true. I love Jesus. I trust God. And I am still afraid. Faith hasn't erased what happened. It doesn't delete the memory of that hospital room, and it doesn't keep my body from remembering every phone call, every ultrasound, every moment our world unraveled. Some nights my prayer is nothing more than, God, I'm scared, and I'm trusting You anyway. That's it. That's the whole prayer some nights. I don't think trust and terror are opposites anymore. I think they're companions, living in the same house, and most days they barely speak to each other.

And still, under all of that fear, there's the longing. It hasn't gone anywhere either. It's there when I watch Sully reach for other kids the way he'd reach for a sibling. It's there in the quiet, unguarded moments when I let myself imagine a baby who makes it home. I don't know what to do with a longing that lives right next door to that much fear. I don't know if there's a clean way to hold them together. But I'm learning that maybe I'm not supposed to resolve the tension. Maybe I'm just supposed to keep living inside it, honestly, without rushing myself toward an answer.

Maybe that's why this season feels like the truest version of what I named this place. This is the tender middle. The space between what we've lost and what we still hope for. Where grief for Haven and gratitude for Sully sit side by side. Where hope whispers and fear is still, most days, so much louder.

I don't have a neat ending for this one. We haven't decided anything. Some days I think I could never survive trying again. Other days I think I couldn't survive not trying, not giving Sully the chance at a sibling, not giving myself the chance to hold a baby who stays. Both of those things are true in me at the same time, and I'm trying to let that be okay.

Maybe hope was never the absence of fear. Maybe it's just leaving room for God to write a chapter I can't see yet, even while my hands are still shaking from the last one.

If you're standing in a tender middle like this one, wanting and afraid in the same breath, I don't have advice for you. I just wanted you to know you're not the only one standing there.

Carrying Haven with us, always.